MIN H YOUNG SONG
development of gardening as an art form. It’s certainly not surprising that Harold would be drawn to Noguchi, since the artist offers Harold a way of reimagining what the opening panels depict as a physically laborious and not very respected job into something more refined. At the same time, Tomine must certainly have been aware that Noguchi’s father is the famous poet Yone Noguchi, who lived for many years in the United States and was celebrated in his time for the contributions he made to both American and Japanese literature. Because Yone’s work does not deal as directly with the experiences of Asian immigrants to the United States as that of other writers of his time, his status as an Asian American writer has seemed to many critics to be a slippery one. How fitting, then, that Tomine begins Killing and Dying with Harold reading a quotation by Isamu. The quotation not only speaks to Harold’s yearning to be an artist; it also aligns this yearning with an important if not easily categorizable family of Asian American creative artists. Despite the physical absence of Asian Americans, that is, the question of what role they play in the making of American culture remains decidedly on the table. Then, too, we might note that Harold’s wife is black. This story registers this detail, again, visually rather than verbally, and the wife’s race doesn’t play any direct role in what follows. But the inclusion of this detail suggests that race plays a larger role in the many layers of Tomine’s storytelling than might at first appear to be the case. Throughout the book, if we look closely enough, we find that many of the background characters
are recognizably black and Asian. Other characters are racially ambiguous enough that they could be white or some other ethnicity, which points not only to the diversity of the world these stories create but also how resolutely they refuse simplistic categorization. There is, finally, one last turn of the plot in the story “Killing and Dying” that I feel the need to return to, because it very intentionally returns us to the topic of race in a way that has not been so explicit before. Before the daughter appears on stage at the improv theater, a black comedian tells a provocative joke that involves the n-word. As the daughter flounders on stage, trying desperately to connect with the audience, she responds to a black heckler by saying, “But I g-g-guess it’s OK to t-t-tell a bunch of ‘n-word’ jokes, right?” Unfortunately for her, the audience member is a different black man than the comedian who had just been on the stage. Not much more is made of this exchange, but it lingers as part of what makes her performance so mortifying to witness. As she tries to explain away her faux pas, Tomine shows her father tucked behind a doorway, hunched down, his eyes closed. In the midst of his grief for his wife, he also finds himself grieving for his daughter and, through this moment, for a present so full of inequality and loss and racial tension it becomes difficult to tell whom we should be angry at and whom we should simply pity.
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